Inside the Kingdom by Carmen Bin Ladin My Life in Saudi Arabia

Osama bin Laden's former sister-in-law provides a penetrating, unusually inti- mate look into Saudi soci-ety and the bin Laden family's role within it, as well as the treatment of Saudi women. On September 11th, 2001, Carmen bin Ladin heard the news that the Twin Towers had been struck. She instinctively knew that her ex-brother-in-law was involved in these hor-rifying acts of terrorism, and her heart went out to America. She also knew that her life and the lives of her family would never be the same again. Carmen bin Ladin, half Swiss and half Persian, married into-and later divorced from-the bin Laden family and found herself inside a complex and vast clan, part of a society that she neither knew nor understood. Her story takes us inside the bin Laden family and one of the most powerful, secretive, and repressed kingdoms in the world.

Book Reporter

For more than a dozen years during the 1970s and '80s, Carmen Bin
Ladin lived a shadowy and increasingly threatened existence as the
problematic foreign wife of a junior member of Saudi Arabia's
powerful Bin Laden clan.

USA Today

(Western spellings of Arab names vary.) Yeslam and Osama had different mothers, and their father, Sheik Mohamed, had 22 wives, 24 sons and 29 daughters.The wealthy and powerful Bin Ladens, owners of the largest construction company in the Middle East, have a relationship with the Saudi royal fami...

People

While her view of Osama is distant, what she reports is chilling: Sharing the epiphanies that spurred her to flee her marriage and protect her three daughters, she recalls the day when Osama refused to allow his sick, suffering infant son to take water from a baby bottle—declaring that only the b...